THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE
OCTOBER 14, 2010. I can sum up many thousands of pages, many academic careers, and much labor in the area of modern philosophy by saying:
The sun sets in the western sky—and our language mirrors that event by stating: “the sun sets in the western sky.”
In other words, language reports events in the physical world.
You wouldn’t believe the internal wrangling that has gone on for decades in the field of academic philosophy around this fairly simple issue.
(In a somewhat related matter, noted linguist Noam Chomsky reported that, because children learn to speak their native tongue so quickly, they couldn’t merely be responding to inputs from their environment—these kids have some sort of innate capacity [or mental imprint] that involves language ability. I’m shocked, I tell you. Shocked.)
However, language as we usually understand it and speak it and write it is not our only option. We could explore and invent other types of language whose purpose is not to reflect events in the physical world.
These new languages would create new realities.
For example—modern poetry. Modern painting. Music. Hah. Turns out we have such languages all around us. Who knew?
Anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
ee cummings
Those lines aren’t merely constructing a fantasy that doesn’t exist in the world. Those lines make relationships that confound what happens and how it happens in the world. They subvert the grammar, syntax, and structure of how things are supposed to happen.
Literalists hate this kind of thing. They claim to the death they don’t understand it. They claim no one, except perhaps insane people, can understand it. They claim it’s a Communist atheist conspiracy eating away at the pillars of Western civilization.
Of course, if you just read the lines of poetry, you begin to sense meaning.
Sea is moon,
Ever there you could,
You but I see
Leaning out over
I just made that up. Why not?
What would happen if two people began talking in a language that didn’t, in its content or structure, reflect the world?
Would they begin to “catch on” to something? Would some previously dormant area of mind and imagination float to the surface and grasp what was happening?
If so, we could speculate that, in fact, there is a huge area of mind/imagination that rarely if ever has the chance to make itself known—because we are trapped in matching our language to the world as it is—not only in content, but in structure and sequence.
I refer you to many movies that posit and depict other worlds of a fantastic nature. But these movies show other worlds as if they were just like ours, except the people, events, and circumstances in them are “more advanced” in various ways. The movies never present these alternate worlds as being of a distinctly different kind than ours. By “different kind,” I mean the order of events, the processes, the relationships partake of a far different “grammar.”
Suppose one of the intrepid Star Trek crews encountered a world in which everyone lived entirely in what we would call a subjective reality? And had a language that reflected that? And looked at life in that fashion? What would THAT be like?
When I talk about the possibility of a magic theater (see my last article), I’m indicating we could have characters on stage partaking of a different KIND of world—and their language would reflect that.
Why bother?
Because no one knows how deep the trance is that we live in, how truly devoted we are to the structure of ordinary reality, how tight we hold on to the sequence and grammar of that reality-language. No one knows how much of our imagination is waiting in the wings to capitalize on a moment when we seek other possibilities.
I fully realize that what I’m saying in this article may take some time to sink in. But that’s all right. Rome wasn’t built in a day. And I’ll tell you a secret. Rome was never destroyed. It lives on in the vast dedication to its fundamental blueprint.
Our language confirms and feeds back to us our perception of what reality is. A new kind language; a new kind of reality. A new KIND of reality. This is what few people want to contemplate.
JON RAPPOPORT